Summer holidays

Colleagues in Essex, and further afield, are waking up this morning to that holiday delight - a weekend without marking or planning. For us here in Kent, there is one more week. A delightful week, crammed with all manner of exciting activities, but a school week, nonetheless. Still, this time next week the school year will be over; uniforms will be put away, school books will be read through, to see how much progress our children have made in the last year, before storing them away. 6 weeks  freedom will loom ahead, without too much thought for the new academic year.

Every September teachers hand out pristine new books, set lessons that will assess the children's current ability, then sigh sadly as they mark a goodly number of books that are well below the standard, at which the previous teacher assessed the children. Is it because the previous teacher 'over-leveled' the children? Well if I'm honest, occasionally it is. Sometimes we genuinely value one trait over another (the creativity versus technical accuracy debate is an interesting one) another, sometimes (dare I say it) the lure of performance related pay it too tempting...the One-more-making-2-sub-levels-and-I'll-have-hit-my-target syndrome does exist, whether we like it or not. But more often than,  not it's simply 6 weeks without picking up a pencil, and in many cases without having opened a single book. (No apologies for Oxford commas, or starting sentences with conjunctions on this blog I'm afraid; it's one, but far from the most significant, of the issues Mr Gove and I don't see eye to eye on. I'll heed the current Ed Sec, in terms of what I tutor though, pinkie promise! )

So what is to be done to ease those September sighs?

For a start - Read! Most libraries have some sort of summer reading challenge, which many children find fun. Read as a family; my grown up children and I still read to each other on family holidays. We all fell in love with Harry Potter in the middle of a campsite in the New Forest. Hot chocolate and Harry evenings were how we ended each day. If you are planning outings, rad the websites together, read reviews of the place,look at the timetables (great for maths) and maps (maths and geography), plan your schedule together. I'm probably teaching granny to suck eggs but it's so easy to just do things ourselves because its quicker. Anything written will help keep your child's reading  ticking over, especially if you talk about what you've just read.

Collect fliers/posters..any text that your child is interested in is a potential learning tool

And Write! Postcards, reviews... create a Trip Advisor account and become critics...diaries are fun and if your child has Show and Tell, the children love hearing about their classmate's adventures and the new teacher will probably love to flick through it next term. It will helps us get to know your child's interests as well as getting an idea of his /her abilities.

If there is anyone out there who has holiday ideas, please feel free to post them. 6 weeks is a lot of time to fill, so let's make it as much fun, and as creative as possible.